It is in these changing times….

It has been a very busy couple of weeks for Scottish island mum and a growing sense of change. Everything changes all the time but sometimes we need to make the changes happen. I am 50 in a few weeks and perhaps this is the catalyst for the changes I need to make. My children are all almost grown up and the dynamics of the family is shifting and this is exciting. Suddenly I seem to be surrounded by a bunch of adults that are all taller than me. As the family changes so do our relationships and it is a truly magical time. My heart seems constantly full of pride as I watch all four of them forging ahead with ever-increasingly independent lives. My role has shifted from a hands on parent to a new role of friend and, sometimes, mentor. I like this change as it is just how it should be.

My working life is changing as well as Scottish island mum continues to spread her wings and take flight in new and exciting directions. As October trundles forward readers will be introduced to some of these new directions and I hope these will be engaging. I am writing more and more of my time and my growing portfolio of e-courses is a source of great delight. I have the privilege of working with a diverse range of people through the online courses and my thinking continues to develop as a result of these interactions. Feedback from the courses has been consistently excellent and I am very humbled by that.

As I settle to begin writing my new year e-course ‘The Year Ahead’ I fall back on planning methodologies that I have trained in in recent years. These methodologies are challenging but they have taught me how to focus on where my essence needs to take me rather than be distracted by other people’s agendas. This new e-course is about sharing this practice for people who want to approach their year differently and return to a place of contented being. In the past few weeks I fear I have drifted some distance from my essence as I have allowed myself to get rather caught up in issues that are not in tune with the way I think. This happens to all of us from time to time and makes us feel unsettled.

I was off-island last week and although it didn’t become the week I had planned it did offer me the chance to reflect from a distance. If I am brutally honest I was not overly impressed with what came into view. Somehow I seem to have lost my way a bit and drifted far too far from my essence. Thus, the unsettled feelings have been growing. It is absolutely time to put the breaks on and that is exactly what I have done as far as is possible. In my trip away I met the most remarkable woman I have ever met in my entire life and she has altered the way I view some aspects of my life. I will introduce you to her fully in the new year but for now I want to focus on where this shifting viewfinder is leading me.

At the core of my essence is my relationship with Mother Nature and I can clearly see how this has become depleted and unhappy. Autumn is a gateway to the colder, darker winter and my absolute favourite season. This year it is passing me by on the other side of the street and I feel removed from this most sacred of relationships. My life is so full of other things that my essence has been rather eclipsed. Sometimes my enthusiasm for projects takes over and I go marching off in an entirely new direction. I am thinking that this process will be familiar to a lot of you reading this.

In putting the finishing touches to my e-course ‘An Alternative Christmas’ that launches on Wednesday I could clearly see where I had lost my way a little. Thankfully, the writing of these courses have hauled me back somewhat and I shall be forever grateful. The answer is a rather premature approach to the planning of 2015 which I normally take the month of January to complete. But I have started that process now as a way of reconnecting with my essence and restoring a more balanced sense of priorities.

I will always be a mother first second and last and that is how it should be. More than that I am a home schooling mother and that comes with extra responsibilities. Thankfully, I have always managed to maintain those responsibilities no matter what chaos breaks out around me. But I am also a grower and somewhere along the line I have lost touch with that. There is a fairly good reason in the bag though as my on going battle with fibromyalgia is making it more and more difficult to do all that I would like to do on the land. There lies the most obvious of lessons that I have been missing. I need to trim back my growing aspirations to make them more achievable and it is nothing more complicated than that. And so you can see a plan being re-written slightly….

It is not all bad news however as my ‘crafting’ bit of me has been well fed this year with the busiest year I have had for some time. The sewing machine I purchased earlier in the year has been very well used and I now just keep my older vintage machines so that I can look at them for time to time. A very dear friend also gifted me her old singer non-electric machine and that is in my garden studio and comes out to play very regularly.

I have never been much of a fan of the excuse that ‘I don’t have time.’ Time is an odd concept that we all grapple with but it is entirely possible to create time and this is the premise of my new year course. Within this premise lies Mother Nature as she teaches us about changes in time that will affect our relationship with the planet we inhabit. Older civilisations like the Celtics and the American Indian tribes had fascinating relationships with time but we have rather lost that. Our time is dictated by a ticking clock that appears to speed up as we age. That does not need to be the case and my studies over the past few years with two important wisdom thinkers has retrained my relationship with time. I am calling this little drift away from my essence a small hiccup and it is no more than that.

My premature planning is thus allowing for a re-grounded approach to what will be the remainder of this year and then my 2015. I always imagined that I would begin a deeply outrageous decade when I turned 50 and I intend to gather that up from the cutting floor and reinstate it with renewed vigour. It seems the most obvious way to proceed.

Inevitably in my planning some things do land on the cutting floor and I fear there will be more things down there than there have been for some time. While that is always a source of some regret I instinctively know it is for the best for me and my children. Scottish island mum is not just a neat label it is a belief system and I now look forward to a shifting view of mum as my children move forward in life. They will, of course, be highly embarrassed by the whole body tattoos, earrings to the floor and punkhairstyle but that will be their problem….